Welcome to the Open Source Puppet Quick Start Guide. Whether you’re setting up a Puppet installation for a real deployment or simply want to learn some fundamentals of configuration management with Open Source Puppet, this series of guides provides the steps you need to get up and running relatively quickly. We’ll walk you through Puppet installation and show you how to automate some basic tasks that sysadmins regularly perform.

The following guides present tasks in the order that you would most likely perform them. See the prerequisite sections in each guide to ensure you have the correct setup to perform the steps as they’re provided:

1. Perform Pre-Install Tasks

Follow these instructions to ensure you meet the system requirements for Puppet, to designate servers, to decide on a deployment type, and more.

2. Install Puppet

Next, you’ll install and configure your Puppet master and agents.

A computer that runs the Puppet Server is called the “master.” Follow these instructions to install and configure Puppet Server.

A computer that runs the Puppet agent is called a “Puppet agent” or simply “agent”. The Puppet agent regularly pulls configuration catalogs from a master and applies them to the local system.

Follow these instructions to install a Puppet agent on Windows or *nix.

To learn how to get your Puppet master and agents to communicate with each other and to ensure your Puppet master will receive certificates from its agents, follow the instructions in the Master/Agent Communication Quick Start Guide.

3. Create a User and Group

4. Hello, World!

Modules contain classes, which are named chunks of Puppet code and are the primary means by which Puppet configures and manages nodes. The instructions in the Hello World! Quick Start Guide lead you through the fundamentals of Puppet module writing. You’ll write a very simple module that contains classes to manage your message of the day (motd) and create a Hello, World! notification on the command line.